Racing changes

Turf wars

Toffs and spivs are quarrelling over the sport of kings

FEW British institutions have proved as steadfast as racing, the sport of kings. Whereas the Royal Navy stopped handing out rum rations in 1970, and the younger royals have moved away from family values and good taste, racing still clings to its oldest traditions.

At Royal Ascot, Britain's most famous race meeting, men entering the royal enclosure wear full morning dress and ladies cover their shoulders and midriffs. Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, calls racing the “last bastion of old-fashioned chivalry”, where women are treated with courtesy and even sozzled crowds have “exceptionally good manners”.

Away from the track, however, the relationship between the toffs who run racing and the bookmakers who pay its bills has taken a turn for the worse. They are at each others' throats over the question of how much bookies should pay to keep the horses in oats. Negotiations broke down late last year, forcing them to ask the government to decide, something that happens from time to time. This year the talks have become uncommonly uncivil because of a new twist: half the country's racecourses (including some of its biggest) have backed a new television service, Turf TV, set up to compete with the existing one owned by bookmakers. Its footage of lather-necked horses racing towards the finish line may cost bookmakers £50m a year more.

Wrangling between the toffs and spivs dates back to at least the 1930s, when gamblers first started to subsidise the track. Racing has always been unprofitable for most of its participants, not least owners and trainers, who are mainly in it for love, not money. Because the betting industry relies on the sport for its profits, the government has long forced bookies to cough up to subsidise racetracks and the racehorse owners.

At first it did so by allowing bookies to take bets only at the track, where they were charged an entrance fee five times higher than the public one. And since 1961, when gambling away from the course was legalised, it has forced betting shops to pay a levy which currently stands at about a tenth of their gross profits from horseracing. This now yields a bit less than £100m a year, according to Deloitte, an accounting firm—or almost a quarter of racing's total revenues and most of its prize money. Even so, horse owners recoup less than a quarter of their operating costs, far less than in France, Japan and America, reckons Wray Vamplew, of Stirling University. About a tenth of British owners and trainers drop out of the sport each year.

The current squabble is one in a series but it signals the possibility of far-reaching change. The government has long wanted to get rid of the levy, fretting that, were the matter taken to court, the transfer could be deemed illegal state aid. So spivs and toffs have been encouraged to find a commercial arrangement that doesn't involve state mediation. Letting racecourses charge for their own television feeds is not without problems: it introduces uncertainty and less popular racecourses may fail. Yet allowing the market to decide the sport's worth is a punt racecourses may have to take.